a blog by Oliver Peters

Tag Archives: Martin Scorsese

Few directors have Martin Scorsese’s talent to tell entertaining stories about the seamier side of life. He has a unique ability to get us to understand and often be seduced by the people who live outside of the accepted norms. That’s an approach he’s used with great success in films like Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and others. Following this path is Scorsese’s newest, The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the memoir of stock broker Jordan Belfort.

Belfort founded the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont in the 1990s, which eventually devolved into an operation based on swindling investors. The memoir chronicles Belfort’s excursions into excesses and debauchery that eventually led to his downfall and federal prosecution for securities fraud and money laundering. He served three years in federal prison and was sentenced to pay $110 million in restitution after cooperating with the FBI. The film adaptation was written by Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire, Sopranos), who himself spent some time working in a tamer environment at Merrill Lynch during law school. Leo DiCaprio stars as Belfort, along with Jonah Hill and Matthew McConaughy as fellow brokers. ( Note: Due to the damage caused by the real Belfort and Stratton Oakmont to its investors, the release of the film is not without its critics. Click here, here and here for some reactions.)

I recently spoke with Thelma Schoonmaker, film editor for The Wolf of Wall Street. Schoonmaker has been a long-time collaborator with Martin Scorsese, most recently having edited Hugo. I asked her how it was to go from such an artistic and technically complex film, like Hugo, to something as over-the-top as The Wolf of Wall Street. She explained, “When I encounter people outside of this industry and they learn I had some connection with Hugo, they make a point of telling me how much they loved that film. It really touched them. The Wolf of Wall Street is a completely different type of film, of course.”

“I enjoyed working on it, becauseof its unique humor, which no one but Scorsese expected. It’s highlyentertaining. Every day I’d get these fantastically funny scenes in dailies. It’s more of an improvisational film like Raging Bull, Casino or Goodfellas. We haven’t done one of those in awhile and I enjoyed getting back to that form. I suppose I like the challenge, because of the documentary background that Marty and I have from our early careers. Continuity doesn’t always match from take to take, but that’s what makes the editing great fun, but also hard. You have to find a dramatic shape for the improvised scenes, just as you do in a documentary.”

Schoonmaker continued, “The scenes and dialogue are certainly scripted and Scorsese tells the actors that they need to start ‘here’ and end up ‘there’. But then, ‘have fun with the part in the middle’. As an editor, you have to make it work, because sometimes the actors go off on wonderful tangents that weren’t in the script. The cast surrounding Belfort and his business partner, Donnie Azoff (played by Jonah Hill),very quickly got into creating the group of brokers who bought into the method Belfort used to snag investors into questionable stock sales.They are portrayed as notnecessarily the smartest folks and Belfort used that to manipulate them and become their leader. This is fertile ground for comedy and everyone dove into their parts with incredible gusto – willing to do anything to create the excess that pervaded Belfort’s company. They also worked together perfectly as an ensemble – creating jealousies between themselves for the film.”

The Wolf of Wall Street is in many ways a black comedy. Schoonmaker addressed the challenges of working with material that portrayed some pretty despicable behavior. “Improvisation changed the nature of this film. You could watch the actors say the most despicable things in a take and then they’d crack up afterwards. I asked Leo at one point how he could even say some of the lines with a straight face! Some of it is pretty bizarre, like talking about how to create a dwarf-tossing contest, which Belfort organized as morale boosting for his office parties. Or offering a woman $10,000 to shave her head. And this was actually done in dead seriousness, just for sport.”

In order to get the audience to follow the story, you can’t avoid explaining the technical intricacies of the stock market. Schoonmaker explained, “Belfort started out selling penny stocks. Typically these have a fifty percent profit compared with blue chips stocks that might only have a one percent profit margin. Normally poorer investors buy penny stocks, but Belfort got his brokers to transfer those sales techniques to richer clients, who were first sold a mix of blue chip and penny stocks. From there, he started to manipulate the penny stocks for his own gain, ultimately leading to his downfall. We had to get some of that information across, without getting too technical. Just enough – so the audience could follow the story. Not everything is explained and there are interesting jumps forward. Leo fills in a lot of this information with his voice-overs. These gave Leo’s character additional flavor, reinforcing his greed and callousness because of the writing. A few times Scorsese would have Leo break the fourth wall by talking directly to the audience to explain a concept.”

The Wolf of Wall Street started production in 2012 for a six-month-long shoot and completed post in November 2013. It was shot primarily on 35mm film, with additional visual effects and low-light material recorded on an ARRI ALEXA. The negative was scanned and delivered as digital files for editing on a Lightworks system.

Schoonmaker discussed the technical aspects. “[Director of Photography] Rodrigo Prieto did extensive testing of both film and digital cameras before the production. Scorsese had shot Hugo with the ALEXA, and was prepared to shoot digitally, but he kept finding he liked the look of the film tests best. Rob Legato was our visual effects supervisor and second unit director again. This isn’t an effects film, of course, but there are a lot of window composites and set extensions. There were also a lot of effects needed for the helicopter shots and the scenes on the yacht. Rob was a great collaborator, as always.

“Scott Brock, my associate editor, helped me with the temp sound mixes on the Lightworks and Red Charyszyn was my assistant handling the complex visual effects communication with Rob. They both did a great job.” Scott Brock added some clarification on their set-up. According to Brock, “The lab delivered the usual Avid MXF media to us on shuttle drives, which we copied to our EditShare Xstream server. We used two Avids and three Lightworks for Wolf, all of which were networked to the Xstream server. We would use one of the Avids to put the media into Avid-style folders, then our three Lightworks could link to that media for editing.”

Schoonmaker continued, “I started cutting right at the beginning of production. As usual, screening dailies with Scorsese was critical, for he talks to me constantly about what he has shot. From that and my own feelings, I start to edit. This was a big shoot with a very large cast of extras playing the brokers in the brokerage bullpens. These extras were very well-trained and very believable, I think. You really feel immersed in the world of high-pressure selling. The first cut of the film came in long, but still played well and was very entertaining. Ultimately we cut about an hour out to get to the final length of just under three hours with titles.”

“The main ‘rewriting of the scenes’ that we did in the edit was because of the improvisations and the occasional need for different transitions in some cases. We had to get the balance right between the injected humor and the scripted scenes. The center of the film is the big turning point. Belfort turns a potentially damaging blow to an IPO that the company is offering into a triumph, as he whips up his brokers to a fever pitch. We knew we had to get to that earlier than in the first cut. Scorsese didn’t want to simply do a ‘rise and fall’ film. It’s about the characters and the excesses that they found themselves caught up in and how that became so intoxicating.”

An unusual aspect of The Wolf of Wall Street is the lack of a traditional score. Schoonmaker said, “Marty has a great gift for putting music to film. He chose unexpected pre-recorded pieces to reflect the intensity and craziness of Belfort’s world. Robbie Robertson wrote an original song for the end titles, but the rest of the film relies completely on existing songs, rather than score. It’s not intended to be period-accurate, but rather music that Scorsese feels is right for the scene. He listens to [SiriusXM] The Loft while he’s shaving in the morning and often a song he hears will just strike him as perfect. That’s where he got a lot of his musical inspiration for Wolf.”

The newest stereo 3D film sensation promises to be Martin Scorsese’sHugo, just in time for the holidays. The film is the director’s first 3D venture and is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a children’s graphic novel written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. It’s the story of twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan who lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station. Hugo gets wrapped up in the mystery involving his father and a strange mechanical man.

Scorsese – who’s as much a film buff as an award-winning director – has a deep appreciation for the art form of past 3D films, like Dial M for Murder. In adapting this fantastical story, Scorsese and his Oscar-winning team have an ideal vehicle to show what stereo 3D can do in the right hands and when approached with care. Unlike the groundbreaking Avatar, which relied heavily on motion capture and synthetic environments, Hugo is a more cinematic production with real sets, actors and is based on the traditional language of filmmaking.

Hugo started production in 2010 using then-prototype ARRI ALEXA cameras, which were configured into special 3D camera rigs by Vince Pace. The ALEXA was the choice of cinematographer Bob Richardson for its filmic qualities. Camera signals were captured as 1920 x 1080 video with the Log-C color profile to portable HDCAM-SR recorders. Hugo will be the first 3D release produced with this particular equipment complement. With post for Hugo in its final stages, I had a chance to speak with two of Scorsese’s key collaborators, Rob Legato (visual effects supervisor and second unit director of photography) and Thelma Schoonmaker (film editor).

Developing the pipeline

Rob Legato has been the key to visual effects in many of Scorsese’s films, including The Aviator. For Hugo, Legato handled effects, second unit cinematography and, in fact, developed the entire start-to-finish stereo 3D post pipeline. Legato started our conversation with the back story, “I had done a small film with the ARRI D-21 and Bob [Richardson] loved the look of the camera. He liked the fact that it was produced by a traditional film camera manufacturer, so when the ALEXA came out, he was very interested in shooting Hugo with it. In order to make sure that the best possible image quality was maintained, I developed a DI workflow based on maintaining all the intermediate steps up to the end in log space. All effects work stayed in log and dailies color correction was done in log, so that no looks were baked in until the final DI stage. We used LUTs [color look-up tables] loaded into [Blackmagic Design] HDLink boxes for monitoring on-set and downstream of any the visual effects.”

“The original dailies were color corrected for editorial on a Baselight unit and that information was saved as metadata. We had both an Avid Media Composer and a Baselight system set up at my home facility, The Basement. Thelma cuts on Lightworks, but by mirroring her edits on Media Composer, I had the information in a form ready to disperse to the visual effects designers. I could load the color grades developed by Marty, Bob and the colorist for each scene into my Baselight, so that when I turned over finished VFX shots to Thelma, they would have the same look applied as those shots had from the dailies. That way a VFX shot wouldn’t be jarring when Thelma cut it back into the sequence, because it would match the same grade.”

Working in the language of stereo 3D

The key to the look of Hugo is the care put into the stereo 3D images. In fact, it’s very much a hand crafted film. Legato continued, “All the 3D imagery was done in-camera. You could never accomplish this type of look and emotional feel with post production rotoscoping techniques used to turn 2D films into 3D. Stereo was designed into the film from the very beginning. Not 3D gags, but rather a complete immersive style to the sets, lighting, camera moves and so on. Marty and Bob would watch the shots on set in 3D wearing their glasses. Performances, lighting, stereography and the position of items in the set were all tweaked to get the best results in 3D. The sets were designed for real depth, including elements like steam and particles in the air. You feel what it’s like to be in that space – emotionally. In the end, the story and the look are both a real love affair with motion pictures.”

One of the common complaints stereo 3D critics offer is that cinematographers cannot use shallow depth-of-field for storytelling. Legato responded, “Marty and Bob’s approach was to create those depth cues through lighting. We erred on the side of more focus, not less – more in the style of Gregg Toland’s work on Citizen Kane. Monitoring in stereo encouraged certain adjustments, like lighting little parts of the set in the background to gain a better sense of depth and control where the audience should focus its attention. That’s why stereoscopic post on 2D films doesn’t work. You cannot put off any part of the art form until later. You lose the taste of the artists. You lose the emotional advantage and the subtlety, because the process hasn’t been vetted by decisions made on the set through staging.”

A tailored approach

At the time of this interview, the film was in the final stages of stereo adjustments and color grading. Legato explained, “Unlike a 2D film, the finishing stage includes a final pass to tweak the 3D alignment. That is being handled by Vince Pace’s folks with Marty and Bob supervising. When they are done, that information will go to the colorist to be integrated into the grade. Greg Fisher has been our colorist throughout the film. Often you don’t have the same colorist for dailies as for the DI, but this is a color workflow that works best for Bob. By establishing a look during dailies and then carrying that data to the end with the same colorist – plus using Baselight at both ends – you get great continuity to the look. We tailored the most comfortable style of working for us, including building small 3D DI theaters in England and New York, so they could be available to Marty where he worked. That part was very important in order to have proper projection at the right brightness levels to check our work. Since the basic look has already been establish for the dailies, now Greg can concentrate on the aesthetics of refining the look during the DI.”

Cutting in 3D

Thelma Schoonmaker has been a close collaborator with Martin Scorsese as the editor for most of his films. She’s won Best Editing Oscars for The Departed, The Aviator and Raging Bull. Some editors feel that the way you have to cut for a stereo 3D release cramps their style, but not so with Schoonmaker. She explained, “I don’t think my style of cutting Hugo in 3D was any different than for my other films. The story really drives the pace and this is driven by the narrative and the acting, so a frenetic cutting style isn’t really called for. I didn’t have to make editorial adjustments based on 3D issues, because those decisions had already been made on set. In fact, the stereo qualities had really been designed from take to take, so the edited film had a very smooth, integrated look and feel.”

Often film editors do all their cutting in 2D and then switch to 3D for screenings. In fact, Avatar was edited on an older Avid Media Composer Adrenaline system without any built-in stereo 3D capabilities. Those features were added in later versions. Hugo didn’t follow that model. Schoonmaker continued, “I cut this film in 3D, complete with the glasses. For some basic assemblies and roughing out scenes, I’d sometimes switch the Lightworks system into the 2D mode, but when it came time to fine-cut a scene with Marty, we would both have our glasses on during the session and work in 3D. These were flip-up 3D glasses, so that when we turned to talk to each other, the lenses could be flipped up so we weren’t looking at each other through the darker shades of the polarized glass.”

Thelma Schoonmaker has been a loyal Lightworks edit system user. The company is now owned by EditShare, who was eager to modify the Lightworks NLE for stereo 3D capabilities. Schoonmaker explained, “The Lightworks team was very interested in designing a 3D workflow for us that could quickly switch between 2D and 3D. So, we were cutting in 3D from the start. They were very cooperative and came to watch how we worked in order to upgrade the software accordingly. For me, working in 3D was a very smooth process, although there were more things my two assistants had to deal with, since ingest and conforming is a lot more involved.”

Prior to working on Hugo, the seasoned film editor had no particular opinion about stereo 3D films. Schoonmaker elaborated, “Marty had a very clear concept for this film from the beginning and he’s a real lover of the old 3D films. As a film collector, he has his own personal copies of Dial M for Murder and House of Wax, which he screened for Rob [Legato], Bob [Richardson] and me with synced stereo film projection. Seeing such pristine prints, we could appreciate the beauty of these films.”

Editing challenges

The film was shot in 140 production days (as well as 60 second-unit days) and Thelma Schoonmaker was cutting in parallel to the production schedule. Principal photography wrapped in January of this year, with subsequent editing, effects, mix and finishing continuing into November. Schoonmaker shared some final thoughts, “I’m really eager to see the film in its final form like everyone else. Naturally I’ve been screening the cuts, but the mix, final stereo adjustments and color grading are just now happening, so I’m anxious to see it all come together. These finishing touches will really enhance the emotion of this film.”

“Hugo is a fairy tale. It is narrative-driven versus being based on characters or environments. That’s unlike some of Scorsese’s other films, like Raging Bull, Goodfellas or The Departed, where there is a lot of improvisation. Marty injected some interesting characters into the story, like Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector. These are more fleshed out than in the book and it was one of our challenges to weave them into the story. There are some great performances by Asa Butterfield, who plays Hugo, and Ben Kingsley. In fact, the boy is truly one of a great new breed of current child actors. The first part of the film is practically like a silent movie, because he’s in hiding, yet he’s able to convey so much with just facial emotions. As an editor, there was a challenge with the dogs. It took a lot of footage to get it right [laughs]. Hugo ends as a story that’s really about a deep love of film and that section largely stayed intact through the editing of the film. Most of the changes happened in the middle and a bit in the front of the film.”

From the imagery of the trailers, it’s clear that Hugo has received a masterful touch. If, like me, you’ve made an effort to skip the 3D versions of most of the recent popular releases, then Hugo may be just the film to change that policy! As Rob Legato pointed out, “Hugo is a very immersive story. It’s the opposite of a cutty film and is really meant to be savored. You’ll probably have to see it more than once to take in all the detail. Everyone who has seen it in screenings so far finds it to be quite magical”.

NOTE: This post has been changed into a page on the top header, called “Film Stories”. Further updates will be made on that page.

I’ve had the good fortune, thanks to my work with Videography and Digital Video magazine, to interview an inspiring collection of some of the best film editors in the world. You can click on the “filmmakers” category on the side panel to access these stories, but I’ve aggregated them here for easy access here.

These interviews cover a wide range of feature film styles. The interviewees were gracious enough to share their experiences with creative challenges and how they leveraged editing technology to get the job done. For those keeping a tally, Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro are well-represented, along with “cameos” by Lightworks. Even Adobe’s tools make several appearances. Although I don’t consider myself in the same league as most of these luminaries, I’ve included a few projects of mine, which happen to fit nicely into the world of indie filmmaking.

I hope you will take the time to revisit these articles and pick up some tips that might benefit your own personal style. Enjoy!

With Oscar time approaching and movie-going, as well as, movie-giving a holiday tradition for many families, I decided to post a list of some films that are fun for editors to watch. These aren’t all Oscar-contenders, although there’s plenty of bling in this list. They are presented in no particular order, so I hope you enjoy.

This is the newest film in the batch and I found it to be not only well-crafted, but also beautifully shot (cinematography by Robert Richardson). Tarantino draws a lot of opinions, but it’s clear that his approach to shooting and editing uses a very classic style. Pay attention to the dialogue scenes and you’ll agree that Tarantino is probably the best director today in structuring and directing dialogue-driven films.

This quirky film is best known for the way the plot is revealed in reverse. In fact, there’s a DVD version that lets you run the scenes from back-to-front in a somewhat linear, chronological order. Although you’d think the scene construction is a contrivance developed in the cutting room, Dorn is the first to admit that this was actually how the script was written.

Slumdog Millionaire beat it out for best cinematography, but nevertheless, Button is a gorgeous example of how digital films can look (cinematography by Claudio Miranda). The aging VFX are the hook, of course, but they work well in service of the story. The editing helps to move the story along, aiding the matter of fact way in which the story is told by its characters.

I enjoy documentaries, but they don’t get any better than when the actual events take plot turns as if they were scripted. In this story about paraplegic rugby, the participants are like gladiators in wheelchairs. It was shot with a variety of DV cameras, but the editing pace makes that something you’ll never obsess over. Natural rivalries develop and this story is a blast for anyone who loves films about sports and sports personalities.

Blackhawk DownDirector: Ridley ScottFilm editor: Pietro Scalia

Scott’s film about the horrific events in Mogadishu is a seminal war film – representative of the surrealism of conflict in ways that a film like Apocalypse Now could never do justice to. It’s also a movie that I feel was largely built in the edit bay. Dump a bushel basket of disjointed combat footage on the editor and see what you get.

Pick any or all of the three. They are all great. The main criticism leveled by others is the shaky-cam style of shooting and the frenetic ADD cutting. Not something that bothers me in the least. Nevertheless, the films are a fast ride for the audience and exemplify good, fast-paced cutting. It’s all the more helped by the believability Matt Damon brings to the role.

This 2003 remake probably didn’t make many “best lists”, but I enjoyed the film. It’s a nicely crafted caper flick without many flaws. You’ll notice the deft editing Christopher Rouse (The Bourne Ultimatum) brings to the movie. Plus a really cool car chase scene with Minis!

This is Coppola’s first digital film. It was shot in Romania and is highlighted by some gorgeous cinematography (Mihai Malaimare, Jr.) and a very evocative score (Osvaldo Golijov). It’s a very romantic and surrealistic tale that will keep you enthralled until the end.

This film is credited with starting the move to DI finishing, thanks to DP Roger Deakins. It’s got a great look and the story shows the Coens at their best, with homages to The Wizard of Oz and Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. I happen to like George Clooney when he plays the buffoon and the stellar cast of O Brother never disappoints in the madcap category.

Although technically a documentary, Shine A Light is one of the best concert films in years. I’ve cut my share of concert shows, so I was cutting this one right in my head the whole time I was watching. It’s certainly a fun cut and one that gives you an intimate look inside the performance. Coupled with a Bob Clearmountain live music mix, you’ll feel like you’re right in the middle of the Beacon Theater when you watch this one.

I saw this again the other night on Comedy Central and it was hilarious. This is a Wright/Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) spoof of cop/buddy films, that has more action than most action films. Pay close attention to the cutting, as this film has over 5,000 picture edits! Dickens picked up an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, but this effort is no less inspiring for other editors. There is some over-the-top violence (a la Monty Python), but in spite of the parody, Hot Fuzz holds up well against “legitimate” action films like the Bourne franchise.

There Will Be BloodDirector: Paul Thomas AndersonFilm editor: Dylan Tichenor

Daniel Day-Lewis is totally captivating as oilman Daniel Plainview in this film adaption of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! This is also a look at the beauty of film at its best, done the “natural way” – i.e. no DI. Kudos to Robert Elswit, whose cinematography has a real richness to it. For the editors in the crowd, pay attention to the first portion of the film. Tichenor does a masterful job of advancing the story over many years of Plainview’s life without any dialogue.

Well, that’s a quick look at a dozen films for the holidays. Have fun!

Once again the Rolling Stones rock the house. First in Berlin to open the 58th Berlin International Film Festival and now around the country. I’m not talking about stadiums, but rather Martin Scorsese’s new concert film Shine A Light. Scorsese was instrumental in inventing the rock ‘n roll concert film genre as an editor on Woodstock and the director of The Last Waltz. Now he continues his passion for the art form by teaming up with none other than Mick and Keith to bring you up close and personal with the world’s greatest rock ‘n roll band.

This isn’t your average production. Scorsese pulled together an Oscar-winning crew, headed up by cinematographer Robert Richardson (The Aviator, JFK). Cameras were manned by a crew that included John Toll (The Last Samurai, Braveheart), Andrew Lesnie (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong), Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano, The Painted Veil), Robert Elswit (Magnolia, Good Night and Good Luck), Emmanuel Lubezki (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Sleepy Hollow) and Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Live recording was handled by Grammy-nominated recording engineer Bob Clearmountain. Rounding out this ensemble was editor David Tedeschi, who most recently had worked with Scorsese on the acclaimed Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

I caught up with David Tedeschi as he was wrapping up the bonus features for the Shine A Light DVD. Tedeschi is a New York-based editor who mainly works on feature films, documentaries and music projects. He first hooked up with Scorsese on The Blues, which was being posted at the same time as Scorsese was working on The Aviator. Something must have worked, because Tedeschi was tapped to cut No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and now Shine A Light. David filled me in on Scorsese’s approach to this production. “Marty didn’t want to film a Rolling Stones concert in a huge arena. There have been many Rolling Stones concert films – mostly in stadiums and large venues. He wanted a smaller, more intimate stage and that’s where the idea to film in the Beacon Theater in New York was conceived. This gave Marty a chance to show these guys for who they are – and lend an immediacy to the performances. It’s really a very positive and exciting film about how these four guys go out and make music. They are the real deal, with Mick singing and moving around on the stage like a 20-year-old – and Keith, Ronnie and Charlie going out there every night with great passion. That really comes across in Shine A Light.”

“Marty has a very clear vision of what he wants as a director. He’s a great film historian and is inspired by a lot of films, but at the same time he always wants to do something fresh. Marty decided that adding the element of comedy would give a concert film something different – another way to see rock ‘n roll. The behind-the-scenes footage and the archival clips are often funny.” Some of that can be seen in the Shine A Light trailer, as Scorsese’s reactions are juxtaposed with comments from Jagger and others for a very humorous result.

18 Cameras – No Waiting

Shine A Light was filmed in a smaller theater over two performance nights. Given the resolution of modern HD cameras, you would think this would have been a natural application for the Sony CineAlta models, as Robert Altman had done on A Prairie Home Companion. Instead, Scorsese and Richardson opted to stick with film. In fact, seventeen 35mm cameras rolled along with one Panavision Genesis during both nights. More than 100,000 feet of film ran through the gates – as much as a typical dramatic production, shot over several weeks and months.

The edited film is about two hours long, based largely on the running length of the songs in the concert. Tedeschi explained, “Getting to the two hour length was an intuitive process. We had planned to lose one song, since the entire performance would otherwise be too long. That was easy, but then it turned out that we actually had to lose two songs, which was a tough decision. At least people will get to see them in the DVD extras.”

David continued, “They had actually scheduled four days of rehearsals for the cameras, but in the end, the first night really ended up being like a dress rehearsal. The second night was a much better performance, so 98% of the cut comes from that second night.” I know from experience that no matter how many cameras you have, you still run into situations where you want another angle. David laughed, “Yes, I ran into that, too, but the truth is that Bob Richardson is a bold, dynamic cinematographer. The footage was beautifully lit and working with this team of such great talent was a pleasure, because they delivered superb footage. They did have a modified zone coverage plan for the cameras and Marty was in radio contact with them, of course. But he had such faith in them that he was able to trust their instincts and let them explore, as well. As a result, the performances and the shots they were able to get were more spontaneous than just a series of planned camera moves. In fact, there was a Plan B involving a back-up shoot. The concern was that we might need to shoot some extra angles, such as really tight shots of the Stones, because there weren’t any ‘in your face’ handheld cameras on the stage during the actual performances. In the end, everyone was happy with the material we were able to capture and there was no need to use Plan B.”

The Basement

Post production followed a rather unique path thanks to Scorsese’s frequent visual effects collaborator, Rob Legato (The Aviator, The Departed). Together with producer Ron Ames, Legato is a proponent of many desktop tools and operates a small visual effects facility out of his house, known as The Basement. Legato explained their approach, “Sparkle, Bob Richardson’s preferred colorist at Complete Post, transferred all the film dailies to HDCAM-SR tape in the 10-bit RGB 4:4:4 mode, which becomes the equivalent of a digital negative. He also provided SD dailies for David to capture into the Avid. During the course of the editing, we would take David’s Avid sequence and boil down the nearly 300 source tapes into only two main source tapes. These were basically clones of the originals, so there was no quality loss in this step.”

The Basement’s editor, Adam Gertel, used an Apple Final Cut Pro workstation and a Sony HDCAM-SR deck to do this. Their Mac is configured with a high-speed Ciprico MediaVault RAID and a Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme capture/output unit – ideal for handling the data throughput and preserve the color integrity of the 10-bit 4:4:4 media. The key to this method was to create new Avid-compatible logs so that it was easy to locate any shot on the new tapes, as well as find additional shots on the original transfer masters, if needed.

Legato continued, “Once the film was consolidated onto two tapes, it was easier to reconform the film in Final Cut as David and Marty made additional changes to the cut. Our final color correction was done on a daVinci. Since the source was tape and not media files on a hard drive, any last minute updates could be made in Final Cut, output to HDCAM-SR and then color-corrected on the daVinci in real-time. Although the HDCAM-SR format is only high definition (1920 x 1080) and not a true 2K film file, it’s still more than acceptable for a film-out. The format is still wider than the actual 1828 pixel width of a release print.” The Basement also handled about 80 shots that required some repair or treatment and called upon their Adobe toolkit (After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator) to create effects and titles for the film.

Completing the Cut

Tedeschi did all his cutting on an Avid Media Composer Adrenaline HD system connected to Avid Lanshare shared storage. David explained the rationale to cut in standard definition, “I had to use the multicam feature all along the way and that simply works best on Adrenaline when you stay in standard definition. I needed the responsiveness for Marty and by staying in standard def we were able to see nine camera angles at any given time playing back in real-time. We did our screenings in high definition, though, using Avid’s DNxHD 175 resolution. We would do these screenings at least once a month – and sometimes once a week. The image looked wonderful.” The edit lasted ten to twelve months, but in spite of the time, David tells me there were no surprises. “Every decision was incremental. The band also believed in Marty’s vision, although they had their own insights into the material. We flew to Italy with Bob Clearmountain to screen it for the Stones while they were on tour. The screening was at Technicolor’s screening room in Rome and luckily it was a great sounding room!”

Music, of course, is the most important element to the film and this required plenty of interaction between the mix and the image. Tedeschi pointed out that, “As we made picture changes, it would impact the mix. Generally, Marty would try to accentuate an instrument in the mix if it was featured in a shot, so Bob Clearmountain ended up doing a number of remixes to adjust to our various versions. It’s a great track and all of the concert sound in the film comes from the live recording. In order to get the truest reaction during our screenings, we would present the film in 5.1 surround. I was lucky to have Nick Damiano as my first assistant. He used to work at Sony Studios in New York and knows the audio world extremely well, so he was able to help communicate with Clearmountain, as well as prepare the Avid timeline for our 5.1 screenings. Nick was especially helpful in the tricky sound transitions between the documentary sections and the concert.”

Shine A Light is being released by Paramount Classics as well as by Imax, however music films aren’t off the table for either David Tedeschi or Martin Scorsese. Even as the Rolling Stones echo in the background, both move on to their newest project together, a documentary about George Harrison.

At the beginning of last year, I was wrapping up the commercial cut on some Mississippi economic development spots, when the director, Ron Ames, pulled out his PowerBook to show me some pre-visualization shots for a little movie called The Aviator. There I saw a QuickTime movie of what has become the XF-11 crash sequence used in the film. It was an interesting break in an otherwise typical commercial edit session and I didn’t think too much more about it. Fast-forward a year. Martin Scorsese has released his film about the early Howard Hughes. When I saw it in the theaters, right away I recognized the finished version of the scene I was shown a year before. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Ron get a nice credit as Visual Effects Producer. As it turns out, The Aviator effects team made extensive use of desktop tools, which gave me a good opportunity to speak with Ron about some of the technology they employed.

In spite of the high profile and reasonably large budget of The Aviator Martin Scorsese creates his films and builds his team much like any other independent filmmaker. There is a small cohesive team of professionals, which pull off the filmmaking. For the record, Ron Ames was the Visual Effects Producer and VFX First Assistant Director, working in tandem with Rob Legato (Visual Effects Supervisor / Second Unit Director). Together, they helmed the team responsible for producing 405 effects shots, as well as hundreds of second unit shots (inserts of dials, controls, hands doing things and so on). In addition, the film was posted using digital intermediate technology with an unusual approach to color-grading. Scorsese wanted to achieve the look of two-strip and three-strip Technicolor films typical of the 1920’s and 1930’s for many of the scenes. The responsibility for developing this look also fell to Legato’s unit, in addition to the actual effects shots. The Aviator isn’t really viewed as an effects film, but 405 shots is a comparable number to films that are considered to be special effects intensive. This seemed all the more impressive after Ron told me that their total effects budget was only $8 million. This may sound like a lot of money, but it’s truly miniscule when you compare that to other film budgets.

Off-the-shelf Hardware and Software

Howard Hughes was a man who used the cutting edge technology of his day to achieve his vision and much of the film is about that, so it was only fitting that Scorsese’s effects team used today’s cutting edge technology to produce this film. Ames and Legato put together a small in-house unit of effects designers working with a combination of off-the-shelf technology. This included Mac and PC workstations and a small render farm. According to Ron, “We are pretty open to all the tools and used what was appropriate for the task. This included both Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress DV, but the real ‘Rosetta stone’ for us was Adobe After Effects. Everything went through that at some point. Our render farm was a pretty small affair – about 11 processors. Towards the end, when we were in a crunch mode – if you walked in with a computer, it was usually put to work [laugh].”

Ron explained that the effects load was divided up among several companies. Sony Imageworks and CafeFX handled most of the heavy CGI shots, like the Hell’s Angels (Hughes’ first film, a WWI epic) aerial combat scenes. “The rest we did ourselves with the help of a handful of smaller vendors.” Since Rob Legato is also a cinematographer, the effects unit tried to create as many in-camera, “practical” effects as possible. There was extensive use of models and miniatures, such as in the XF-11 crash scene and the Hercules flying boat finale. The glue that held all of this in-house work together was their off-the-shelf IT infrastructure and a 1.3 TB Medea VideoRaid RTRX storage array. According to Ames, “ We had the SCSI version of the Medea arrays and everything we did went through these drives. They were working flawlessly on a 24/7 basis. Next time we’ll probably take a look at their Fibre Channel versions, particularly the recently released VideoRaid FCR2 or FCR2X arrays; but the SCSI arrays worked great for our needs, including real-time playback of HD dailies.”

High Definition Screenings

The use of HD played a key role in the post of The Aviator. All the film footage was scanned at 2K resolution and delivered as Cineon files. The effects elements were composited and then rendered from 2K to HD-resolution QuickTime movies using After Effects. These files were then dropped into Final Cut for assembly and playback. Although Legato’s effects team was in Los Angeles, Martin Scorsese was cutting the film in New York with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. She prefers to cut on a Lightworks system, so I was curious what the workflow was for editing the effects. “It was really pretty impressive,” Ron explained. “We got all the vendors to provide us temp composites in a two-week period for each of the effects shots. This gave Thelma something to place into the rough cut for Marty’s initial screenings, so that everyone had a good idea how the scenes would play out.”

When it came time to really screen the film with more completed effects, Legato and Ames flew to New York and spent a week reviewing and tweaking shots. “We took all the shots with us on numerous FireWire drives, including the Medea G-RAID 500GB drives. In New York we took an EDL from Lightworks and conformed the movie in Final Cut on a G5 installed in the screening room. This system used a Pinnacle CineWave card connected to an HD projector. As we screened the movie, we would address any changes in the effects, since the drives we had brought also included the elements to make up the shots. Some of these changes could be done in New York and others were changed in Los Angeles. So during that five-day period, we would get daily deliveries of FireWire drives. At the same time, both of our laptops were rendering away back in the hotel room. Then we would drop the fixed or replacement shots into the timeline for immediate feedback. During these screenings we were also able to show Marty how the color-grading was going to look by using After Effects and Final Cut. In essence, we were able to make ‘live’ changes for him and immediately see the results in full HD resolution.”

After Effects as the Key to the Technicolor Look

When it was time for initial audience screenings of the film, the 2K files were rendered to a Qubit playback server at HD resolution. These audiences viewed an HD projection, which Ron told me looked amazingly close to the quality of the 2K files. A lot of press has already been given to the two-strip and three-strip color-grading techniques. This was a look worked out between Rob Legato and Bob Richardson (the director of photography). Legato created LUTs (look-up tables) in After Effects which were then used by Stephen Nakamura, the colorist at Technicolor Digital Intermediates, to create the final look of the film. Most people think of the “Technicolor look” as vibrant, saturated colors, which is actually the look of the three-strip process. Technicolor achieved this using three black-and-white films, which – through optical filtering – created a composite color image, not unlike how RGB components of an electronic picture create a single full-color image. The earlier two-strip techniques used two black-and-white elements instead of three. This reproduced flesh tones reasonably well, but not items like green grass. That look is quite a bit harder to achieve electronically and it is here that the combination of work done in After Effects and color-timing paid off, essentially requiring two color-correction passes. This technique is quite obvious in the film’s golf course scenes, when Howard Hughes meets Katherine Hepburn. A more detailed behind-the-scenes look at creating these and other effects can be found online at www.aviatorvfx.com.

Desktop Tools Aid in Fast Turnaround

Another way in which desktop tools impacted the film was the creation of a new scene intended to show the attention Hughes was getting from early Hollywood. This bridge scene between two portions of the film wasn’t in the original script and, therefore not shot, so the effects team was tasked to come up with a solution. In a three-day period, this scene was shot, edited and cut into the film. Moviegoers will recognize this as the montage of newspapers and other shots about Hughes. Several of the effects team members, including the effects editor, cut versions of this using Avid Xpress DV and Apple Final Cut Pro, which were reviewed by Scorsese and Schoonmaker. In the end, a modified combination of several of their ideas ended up as part of the final scene.

Ron Ames summed it up this way, “The Aviator is a film that’s as much about the technology as the man. Without the technology of today, a film like this couldn’t have been made for the budget we had and still deliver the emotional impact we wanted. Processes like the color-grading came about because that was an emotional tie-in to Marty’s youth. It’s how he remembered seeing those films when he went to the movies as a kid. After seeing the result of Rob’s efforts, he was tickled that it looked just the way he remembered it. We wouldn’t have been able to do this just a few years ago, because the lab processes are long gone and the electronic tools didn’t exist. We were also happy that our indie-film mentality worked out well. The workstations, the render farm, the Medea RTRX and G-RAID drives – they all played a part. They cranked around the clock for about a year and a half and performed flawlessly. Today everyone can get access to the tools, but it’s how you use them to tell the story that counts.”